melanin dreams

[Eric Rosenbloom]

The following book review (excerpted here to save you from reading
either the whole review or the book itself) touches on the issues of
blackness and whiteness that Pynchon builds Gravity's Rainbow upon. It
may offer some insight into Tchitcherine's obsession about Enzian. Also,
to tirelessly, fearlessly, continue the useful discussion of of religion
in this list, it describes how churches emerged to corral a new-born
sense of self into obedience to "the boundaries between our lands, our
bodies, our stories, all false, about who we are" (Gravity's Rainbow,
page 135). Everything following is quoted from the review.

---------------------------------------------------
_Teach Me Dreams: The Search for Self in the Revolutionary Era_, by
Mechal Sobel

Review by Alan Taylor, The New Republic, February 5, 2001

Sobel finds that blacks and whites dreamed obsessively about one another.

Far from celebrating the new triumph of the modern self, Sobel sees a
tragic legacy of the perversion of dreams: "as a result of the growing
need to develop an individuated self, irrational hatreds came to further
dominate our lives."

[Sobel's theoretical basis:]  Studying dreams recorded in Germany during
the 1930s, Charlotte Beradt concludes that people conformed to Nazi
demands in their dreams before embracing them in action. From Heinz
Kohut, Sobel learns that dreams develop and maintain a sense of
identity. ... And Christopher Bollas imparts to Sobel the notion that
"the self" does not simply emerge in complete antithesis with an "other"
-- but also covertly steals ideas and emotions, a process they call
"introjection." In repelling an other in dreams and their narratives,
dreamers mask their own introjections of envied attitudes and behaviors.

In Sobel's account, the self depends upon an exaggerated reaction
against an antithesis, an imagined enemy known to scholars as "the other."

Before the eighteenth century ... most Americans and Britons had a weak
and porous sense of self. ... "They did not see themselves," Sobel
notes, "as having fashioned their lives or as being responsible for
their selves." Indeed, self was their enemy, their "other," best
suppressed as a snare fatal to Christian salvation. This began to change
after 1740, as most people gradually reimagined themselves as assertive
actors at center stage in lives with individual pattern and profound significance.

Dreams were central to the "refashioning" of American selves ...
Troubled by social and political changes in their world ... people
struggled with dark feelings, which found a focus in dreams about an
enemy, "an alien other." In dreams, whites felt attacked by imaginary
blacks or by a guilt for what they had done to blacks. Similarly, blacks
vented their rage at night in dreams of thieving, cheating, abusive
whites. Gender also polarized dreams as men and women imagined one
another as alien others, which helped propel a daytime process of
increasing distinction in their behaviors and attitudes.

"Change in the self was often worked out on the dream-screen, and this
change was then played out in the narrative report of the waking life."

To honor their dreamed commitments to a new self, people needed a
legitimating forum -- a social group to evaluate and to vindicate both
the dream and the changes. Religious groups, especially upstart
Protestant churches, provided the most effective "outside authority."
[T]he churches "helped the individual reframe the past and begin a new
path in life." ... But such groups also narrowed the ambivalent meanings
of dreams, further demonizing the alien other. Far from celebrating the
new triumph of the modern self, Sobel sees a tragic legacy of the
perversion of dreams: "as a result of the growing need to develop an
individuated self, irrational hatreds came to further dominate our
lives." In her closing note, Sobel exhorts her readers to break from
"our binary systems of white/black and male/female, in order to reframe reality.

[criticism:]  Where Freud detected sex within every dream, Sobel finds
race ubiquitously coded.
---------------------------------------------------

Love,
Eric R



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